We’re Always Drowning, Dying to Stay Alive

IV 

Enraged with the fetters was a pigeonhole dream 

associated with water: lame bodies, oars of a shipwreck 

passing through the graduations of night make 

for a long crossing. Blood on cuffs, ocean-wide, 

the subject of a New World is a wild storm, uttering 

lingo with the arrhythmia of raindrops. Don’t talk 

about the fish much, they’ll swallow a village out 

of a chromosome. The boy is a sucker for bush meat, 

ache upon ache, what he’s become is bruised meat—

the rain’s second job is witnessing a shameless watch, 

slithering metaphors of slit throats & awe of death. 

The anti-world is a new name for denying yourself 

before Georgia. Before the helm of a gun finds you 

bawling fists & sun gods into plantations. Songs of 

cellular healing riddle the plants: sugar, rubber, cotton 

& if the cigarette’s fire in an American love story finds 

you longing for natural light, a laden hoe hastens 

toward a shallow grave for your most quiet grace. 

XX 

My daughter watches, her petite hips grinding on    

the third chambers of a man’s legs, his climax calling 

her father to dig the land harder with the imagination   

of sex on a wet balcony. Both of us are tired of rain. 

As much as they spill, are never afraid to steal us an 

ounce from salvation. Water water in skin harvest, 

the plague of utility in a foreigner’s lung. 

We’re dying, bodies marked for mishaps. 

CP Nwankwo, SWAN IV, is an apprentice poet from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He won the Labari Prize for Poetry in 2025 and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Prize for Poetry the same year. He reads poetry for Reckoning Press. Find him on X @CPNwankwo.